Users of communications services are increasingly accessing media content over data communications networks, like the Internet, through content service providers, web portals, games, interactive electronic program guides, and/or other user interfaces. Typically, media content providers desire to maximize their consumers' (e.g., subscribers) engagement with particular media. For example, media content providers provide various marketing, incentive, and other techniques to help consumers find and access desirable content and/or to nudge the consumers toward particular content, thereby increasing profitability, advertising opportunities, etc.
The resulting increase in consumer engagement with media content yields an increased demand for bandwidth resources of the underlying communications infrastructures. In some cases, communications service providers attempt to combat ever-increasing demands on their networks through increased prices, resource throttling, limitations on service offerings, etc. The result can be a conflict between the desire of media content providers to maximize profitable media engagement and the desire of communications service providers to maximize profitable infrastructure resource utilization.
Some approaches strive to better utilize communications resources while also satisfying increasing demands for those resources through time- and/or demand-shifting techniques. Traditional time- and demand-shifting techniques tend to rely on coarse predictions from limited information regarding either subscriber behavior or network behavior. These traditional approaches do not typically support opportunistic exploitation of dynamically changing resource availability and consumer behaviors across the communications infrastructure.